Printers are well known computer peripherals widely used in both home and business computing environments. Printer technology has made rapid advances over recent years. State of the art printers offer ever increasing levels of speed, print quality, easily manipulated format options, and a wide variety of features, such as document collating, stapling, and various levels of print quality. Printers using Inkjet or laser technology are capable of reproducing almost any image. As printer technology advances, the process of printing a document from a computer workstation involves ever increasing numbers of steps. Errors can occur at any of these steps. It has become common practice to keep an “error log” in the printer memory, to track printing errors and technical problems. The repair of inoperable or damaged printers can be aided by examining the error log for patterns of errors occurring prior to breakage.
As it is used herein, the term “printer” signifies any device capable of providing printer function alone or, alternatively, any device providing printer function in combination with one or more other document processing functions, such as, for example, copying, scanning, or facsimile capabilities.
Printer manufacturers provide technical support for printing devices, including software and hardware upgrades to resolve problems that users have encountered with printers. Similarly, new products are designed to overcome difficulties users encounter with earlier designs, while incorporating new features. Traditionally, manufacturers have relied on a few sources for determining the difficulties and errors resulting from printer usage. These include tracking user requests made to technical support web pages and call centers, as well as reports from “beta users” or trial users of printers prior to the general sale of a model of printer.
These methods of gathering information on the common problems and difficulties users encounter with a printer face a number of shortcomings. Only a small sample of errors and problems are reported to service providers or manufacturers. Errors that are relativity easy for a user to remedy may never be reported, even if they may occur frequently. Even in-depth testing of individual printers may fail to show a pattern of errors that is common for that printer model, in actual use. The ability to automatically gather actual information on common printer errors for a large number of similar printers would constitute an improvement in the art. This would allow for improved servicing of those printers, including the provision of software and hardware upgrades, and improve the process of designing future printer models by providing error information based on actual use.